The $350 Punkt MP 02, which is a real phone from a small Swiss phone company, is a great-looking voice-and-text phone that fills a big hole in the AT&T and T-Mobile lineups.

I've railed before about how difficult it is to find a good simple voice phone in the US. I get regular emails from people, mostly older users, who want a phone that's focused on voice quality. While Verizon has a few choices, most notably the Kyocera Cadence LTE, there's simply no good voice phone for T-Mobile right now.

Many global voice phones typically use 2G or 3G GSM rather than LTE. Making voice calls over LTE requires a more powerful, more expensive chipset and software than older systems, and 2G and 3G are still widespread in most of the world. That's not the case in the US. We have effectively no 2G GSM networks. AT&T turned its off, and T-Mobile's has been turned down so far that it's only really usable for machine-to-machine applications. AT&T runs the only 3G GSM network in the country.

The Punkt MP 02, on the other hand, is one of the very few unlocked LTE voice phones out there. Unlike the Nokia 8810, it supports US network bands, and the company is actively trying to sell it here.

The phone will be compatible primarily with AT&T and T-Mobile, although it might work on Verizon. There are US and European versions of the MP 02; the US version has 2G and 3G GSM, and LTE on bands 1/2/4/5/7/12/17.

You're Not Being Punked

I was initially skeptical of Punkt, but it's a real company that's been around for ten years. Founded by Petter Neby, a Norwegian, but based in Switzerland, it's made a few well-designed products in partnership with designer Jasper Morrison—an alarm clock, a cordless desk phone, a USB charger, and a 2G voice phone.

"Initially, we got interest from industrial design geeks because of the designer," Neby said. "But for the phone, it became more of a wider range of audience."

Working from a European perspective, Neby didn't see the urgency of switching to 4G for voice calls. Rather, he wanted the phone to act as an LTE hotspot for other devices, letting European executives carry it as their single phone and still be able to turn to tablets or laptops to get their Slack messages.

"With the tethering, [the phone] can sit at the top of the hierarchy and spread as a hotspot to any kind of device," he said.

The MP 02 is designed to work in the US, but it doesn't have quite all of the frequency bands we use here. Most notably, it doesn't include Verizon's band 13 or T-Mobile's band 71. Band 13 is "more of a rural issue," Neby said, and his core market is "urban busy people."

Punkt's history of actually making and selling products sets it apart from Light Phone, another frequently mentioned high-end maker of simple phones that has leaned on crowdsourcing and has had perpetual stocking and availability problems. Light is currently promising an LTE-based phone to launch in April 2019, but I don't trust its projections.

An Artisanal Experience

The MP 02 costs $350, but it feels like something that costs $350. It's smooth yet angular, made from a matte black plastic with a slightly rubbery pad on the back that holds it in place when it's set down on a table. The physical buttons are very mid-century modern.

Punkt's simple UI is text-based. On the home screen, you don't even see battery level and signal strength—Neby said it only shows those by default if you need to worry about them, not when they're good. Physical buttons jump to calling, texting, or the phone book, and you can program nine speed dials. There are 10 ringtones, and you can input contacts through a web site to prevent having to tap multiple times.

Aside from calls, you can text. That's SMS texting, not WhatsApp or Facebook. You can enter texts using triple-tap or predictive texts, and select emoji from a menu. You can receive texts and picture messages, but as the phone has no camera or eeb browser, you can't send a new picture. The UI is monochrome, but if you receive a picture message, the picture appears in color. The phone has a calculator and a calendar, but no camera and no games.

It's a voice phone, so of course I made a call. My test call was in the most forgiving atmosphere possible, a quiet office, but the earpiece was loud and clear. Punkt wasn't 100 percent clear on which voice codecs the phone would use, or whether it would use voice-over-LTE on AT&T (which has higher quality voice calling than AT&T 3G), so we'll check on that before the full review.

Under the hood, the MP 02 is running a very stripped-down version of Android on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 chipset that's been locked down by BlackBerry security software; only software directly installed by Punkt can run on the phone. Neby told me the phone has about six days of standby battery life.

Is this a primary phone, or a secondary one? Neby described a workflow where people use the MP 02 as their primary device, with its LTE tethering feature activating a tablet or iPod touch for internet access when needed. I think this is also likely to become a weekend phone for high-income disconnectors. Neby said Punkt is aiming to support AT&T's Numbersync and T-Mobile's Digits, both systems that let you use the same number on multiple phones.

What the MP 02 isn't, is an affordable voice phone for kids or the elderly. There's a little bit of tension between the Punkt aesthetic and my readership who want simple voice phones. The MP 02 isn't a luxury product, but it's design-focused and not cheap. I'm very happy to see it in the market, but it still leaves a giant hole on store shelves where $50 to $100 LTE voice phones should go.

I'm very much looking forward to reviewing the MP 02. It comes out in November.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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